„It is inescapable that those determining the shape of our choices when engaging with Information Technology are physically and culturally located in a very small region. Apple, Facebook, and Google are within a stones throw of each other, and even though they recruit from all over the world, there is an astonishing physic self-similarity among the people who work there, whatever their national or cultural origin.“ – Adam Greenfield, author of Radical Technologies

The latest paper shows that some more troubling implicit biases seen in human psychology experiments are also readily acquired by algorithms. […] The AI system was more likely to associate European American names with pleasant words such as “gift” or “happy”, while African American names were more commonly associated with unpleasant words.

These biases can have a profound impact on human behaviour. One previous study showed that an identical CV is 50% more likely to result in an interview invitation if the candidate’s name is European American than if it is African American. The latest results suggest that algorithms, unless explicitly programmed to address this, will be riddled with the same social prejudices.

Steve Jobs’s design philosophy was fascist more than it was exacting. The man was a not a demigod of design, but its dictator. He made things get made the way he wanted them made, and his users appreciated his definitiveness and lack of compromise. They mistook those conceits for virtues in the objects themselves.

This video depicts European birth to death network dynamics 0 to 2012 CE according to „deceased persons“ in Freebase.com. The video was first published as Movie S1 in the article „A Network Framework of Cultural History“ by Schich et al. in Science Magazine on August 1, 2014. More: http://www.cultsci.net/

As the television industry has been remapping the flow of media content, as new forms of producers and distributors enter the marketplace, there has also been an accompanying effort to rethink their interface with media audiences. Over the past decade, we’ve seen a renewed emphasis on audience engagement strategies which seek to ensure consumer loyalty and social buzz as a way for individual programs or networks to “break through the clutter” of the multiplying array of media options. New metrics are emerging for measuring the value of engaged viewers and the kinds of social and cultural capital they bring with them when they embrace a program. So, for example, the rise of Black Twitter has been credited with helping to rally support behind new programs with strong black protagonists, such as ABC’s “Scandal,” Fox’s “Sleepy Hollow” and BET’s “Being Mary Jane.” Second-screen apps are becoming ubiquitous as television producers seek to hold onto the attention of a generation of viewers who are prone to multitasking impulses. The successful “Veronica Mars” Kickstarter campaign opens up the prospect of fans helping to provide funding in support of their favorite stars, creators or series. And the commercial success of “50 Shades of Grey,” which was adapted from a piece of “Twilight” fan fiction, has alerted the publishing world to the previously underappreciated value of women’s fan fiction writing as a recruiting ground for new talent and as a source for new creative material. Yet, for all this focus on engaged audiences, does the industry value some form of viewers and viewership more than others? Which groups are being underrepresented here and why? Are the new economic arrangements between fans and producers fair to all involved?

As a fan of film as well as data, I saw that there was a wealth of quantitative information about the movie world, and far too few outlets that examined them – so I founded BoxOfficeQuant.com.

Through this site, I hope to report on the financial state of the industry and attempt to predict its future; but I’d also like to dive deeper into the creative aspects. I’d like show that statistics can be beautiful themselves, as well as a route to appreciate the art of film.

Power has been an underdeveloped concept in the rhetoric surrounding the use of social intranets. Expressions like “liberation” and “enhanced collaboration” and “empowerment” are common in marketing, but is this really the case? How does power really work in the social intranet? Who is in control? What are the opportunities of this new model? What are the risks?

Using ideas developed by communications scholar Manuel Castells and his work Communication Power, this post introduces how we can understand network power inside of organizations and contemplate its effects.

The OrgOrgChart (Organic Organization Chart) project looks at the evolution of a company’s structure over time. A snapshot of the Autodesk organizational hierarchy was taken each day between May 2007 and June 2011, a span of 1498 days.

Each day the entire hierarchy of the company is constructed as a tree with each employee represented by a circle, and a line connecting each employee with his or her manager. Larger circles represent managers with more employees working under them. The tree is then laid out using a force-directed layout algorithm.

Irony is the most self-defensive mode, as it allows a person to dodge responsibility for his or her choices, aesthetic and otherwise. To live ironically is to hide in public. It is flagrantly indirect, a form of subterfuge, which means etymologically to “secretly flee” (subter + fuge). Somehow, directness has become unbearable to us.

The mapping arms data (MAD) visualization of small arms, light weapons and ammunition transfers was produced by Google as part of the Google Ideas INFO (Illicit Networks, Forces in Opposition) Summit with support from the Igarape Institute and data provided by the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO) small arms database. The PRIO database contains more than 1 mllion records of exports and imports of small arms, light weapons and ammunition across 250 states and territories between 1992 and 2010.

]]>http://blog.marksimon.de/2012/08/08/arms-trade/feed/01397What happens at the World Economic Forum in Davos? : The New Yorkerhttp://blog.marksimon.de/2012/02/27/what-happens-at-the-world-economic-forum-in-davos-the-new-yorker/
http://blog.marksimon.de/2012/02/27/what-happens-at-the-world-economic-forum-in-davos-the-new-yorker/#respondMon, 27 Feb 2012 18:32:24 +0000http://blog.marksimon.de/?p=1310

The stratification begins with the badges. Every participant wears a badge on a lanyard. Every encounter begins with an unabashed glance or two down at the other’s badge. It is Davos Man’s defining gesture. So frequently did gazes slip to reëxamine my badge that I came to know what it must be like to have cleavage. The color of the badge denotes a role, and a degree of access. W.E.F. staff wear blue badges—dark blue for full time and light for temps. “Reporting Press” wear orange and can’t get in a lot of places. Entourages get mint green. The coveted pass is the white one, granting delegates free rein. There are variations: A Strategic Partner gets a blue dot and access to an exclusive lounge. A special hologram used to signal membership in an élite faction called the Informal Gathering of World Economic Leaders, or IGWEL, but now “serves boring logistical purposes,” according to Monck. I was given a white badge, which meant I’d been knighted a Media Leader. Media Leaders may trump Reporting Press (ha!), but they bow before the Media Governors (curses!), who get invited to the off-the-record sit-downs with Geithner and Merkel.

The cultural task I have in mind is meaning-making. I think this is the same task that babies undertake and early humans must have undertaken in clapping hands in imitation of one another, in pointing to something to direct attention to it, in intentionally clapping hands in synchrony with another person. These are the the radical cultural primitives, and language, drawing, writing, print, photography, and now computation are all ways of expanding our ability to clap, to point, to think together and synchronize our minds and our behaviors.

Basically, we discovered that in any interaction, the person with the higher status uses I-words less (yes, less) than people who are low in status. […] When undergraduates wrote me, their emails were littered with I, me, and my. My response, although quite friendly, was remarkably detached — hardly an I-word graced the page. And then I analyzed my emails to the dean of my college. My emails looked like an I-word salad; his emails back to me were practically I-word free.

DataCatalogs.org aims to be the most comprehensive list of open data catalogs in the world. It is curated by a group of leading open data experts from around the world – including representatives from local, regional and national governments, international organisations such as the World Bank, and numerous NGOs.

Miéville brings these quotidian practices into stark perspective. He uses slips of perception and movement back and forth between cities to highlight the contingency of many of the social aspects of the real world. The City & the City draws no hard distinction between the world of fantasy and our own. Instead, Miéville seems to suggest, the real world is composed of consensual fantasies of varying degrees of power. The slippage isn’t between the real world and the fantastic, but between different, equally valid, versions of the real.

The city as social realm strongly refers to communication via images. Comics help turning these images into cultural narratives and aesthetics and to create outstanding icons of modern identity, landmarks of our self-understanding that are, by definition, not bound to specific cities or nations.

What does culture want? To make infinity comprehensible. It also wants to create order — not always, but often. And how, as a human being, does one face infinity? How does one attempt to grasp the incomprehensible? Through lists, through catalogs, through collections in museums and through encyclopedias and dictionaries.

There is simply no way to express precise, detailed and well-articulated ideas or subjects through Powerpoint. The presentations then give the illusion of mastery, comprehension and control over a subject matter. Which means, again, that the most serious issues cannot be discussed through that medium. There is no room for complexity, complicated relations between economic, cultural and political elements. Powerpoint stifles discussion and reasoned argumentation through the bullet point format. It is surface over substance.

So, paradoxically, at the same time as workers are enjoined to use their creativity, it is forcibly channeled through the most impoverishing format where all that matters are strong points, key concepts, and action plans. All neatly lined up. Quite often, after the presentation itself, the presentation is the only document of reference that is preserved (”I missed the meeting, can you send me the Powerpoint?”).

[…] Metal: the focus on end times and Apocalyptic violence, the intense moral outrage, the polarized, almost Manichean world view, the sense of awe and respect for ritualized group behaviour, imagery of damnation, focus on the individual as a flawed moral actor, even the disregard for a material world seen as hopelessly corrupt.

[S]ocial media bullshitters have no knowledge of social theory or methodology. Trust a person who provides no easy answer, who carefully selects their research method, and who understands complex concepts.

[I]n World Cup football blown calls do not exist as a concept in the game. Short of financial collusion or threat, the refs‘ perspective on the game is a part of the game, no different than the quality of a cross or the accuracy of a shot on goal. This is quite a different attitude than other sports take regarding officiating. The idea that a sport could so willingly and systemically embrace perspective is beautiful to me. Not only because it highlights the changing specificity of moment-to-moment configurations of player, ball, and officials, but also because it underscores the role of unfairness and randomness in human experience.

Nothing, absolutely nothing, has to do with race nowadays, in the eyes of white America writ large. But the obvious question is this: if we have never seen racism as a real problem, contemporary to the time in which the charges are being made, and if in all generations past we were obviously wrong to the point of mass delusion in thinking this way, what should lead us to conclude that now, at long last, we’ve become any more astute at discerning social reality than we were before? Why should we trust our own perceptions or instincts on the matter, when we have run up such an amazingly bad track record as observers of the world in which we live? In every era, black folks said they were the victims of racism and they were right. In every era, whites have said the problem was exaggerated, and we have been wrong.

]]>http://blog.marksimon.de/2010/06/07/what-kind-of-card-is-race-by-tim-wise/feed/01023Can You Say That in English? Explaining UX Research to Clientshttp://blog.marksimon.de/2009/11/03/can-you-say-that-in-english-explaining-ux-research-to-clients/
http://blog.marksimon.de/2009/11/03/can-you-say-that-in-english-explaining-ux-research-to-clients/#respondTue, 03 Nov 2009 20:43:52 +0000http://blog.marksimon.de/?p=891Can You Say That in English? Explaining UX Research to Clients

Zombieism is not so much a state of being as a set of practices and cultural scripts. It is not that one is a zombie but that one does being a zombie such that zombieism is created and enacted through interaction. Even if one is “objectively” a mindless animated corpse, one cannot really be said to be fulfilling one’s cultural role as a zombie unless one shuffles across the landscape in search of brains.

Lucha libre is thus constructed around the public secret of the fixed ending. Yet the secret of the fixed ending is only one of a number of back secrets, of stories told and stories hidden, of secrets revealed to conceal still others. The secrecy of the fix stands for a series of dissimulations, for the mystery that animates the genre.

While all meetings have an officially scripted agenda, their tacit agenda is power. Meetings establish who is in charge. When someone calls a meeting, he or she is asserting authority over those who are called on to attend. Meetings are exclusive and closed. In most corporations, who gets invited to a meeting—and who does not—sends a signal about who’s „in the loop“. Meetings are a form of social grooming inside organizations. Meetings impose vertical authority. They establish status hierarchies. […] When power is diffused and distributed more democratically, meetings are no longer necessary. But corporations are not democracies.

]]>http://blog.marksimon.de/2009/07/27/meetings-and-organizational-structure/feed/0716LAX Airport Parking Lot Communitieshttp://blog.marksimon.de/2009/07/22/lax-airport-parking-lot-communities/
http://blog.marksimon.de/2009/07/22/lax-airport-parking-lot-communities/#respondWed, 22 Jul 2009 08:00:36 +0000http://blog.marksimon.de/?p=684Every social situation in which individuals are voluntarily taking part – sometimes they might also be coerced to do so by vocalized or non-vocalized social regulations, sanctions or force – leads to the formation of a social structure. Even in short everyday interactions, sharing an elevator for example, these mechanisms are visible.

An article about one of the most comprehensive longitudinal studies in history with some fascinating insights: What makes us happy? [Link]

Henry Jenkins: Five ways to start a conversation about the new Star Trek film [Link]

]]>http://blog.marksimon.de/2009/05/17/sunday-links-science-star-trek-what-makes-us-happy/feed/0317Interviews in Intranet Needs Analysishttp://blog.marksimon.de/2009/05/06/interviews-in-intranet-needs-analysis/
http://blog.marksimon.de/2009/05/06/interviews-in-intranet-needs-analysis/#respondWed, 06 May 2009 05:09:09 +0000http://blog.marksimon.de/?p=284On a related note to my post from yesterday, Step Two Designs has a short overview on how to use an established qualitative approach from the Social sciences, more precisely interviews, when conducting an intranet needs analysis.
]]>http://blog.marksimon.de/2009/05/06/interviews-in-intranet-needs-analysis/feed/0284Enterprise 2.0 and the ROI Mysteryhttp://blog.marksimon.de/2009/04/17/enterprise-20-and-the-roi-mystery/
http://blog.marksimon.de/2009/04/17/enterprise-20-and-the-roi-mystery/#commentsFri, 17 Apr 2009 06:29:20 +0000http://blog.marksimon.de/?p=169Apart from individual use or hype that hardly relates to your average company, the value and ROI of Enterprise 2.0 tools in organizations is still questionable. The main problems can be found outlined in these articles:

Dion Hinchcliffe: How to measure the ROI of Enterprise 2.0 tools [Link]

A more realistic and pragmatic viewpoint comes from Dennis Howlett [Link]

What makes me wonder is that, coming from a sociological background, i don’t see any insurmountable problems in measuring, and consequently determining, ROI of so-called ’soft‘ correlations. The social sciences have developed a strong and proven tool set for exactly this type of phenomena. Of course, the adapting of these tool sets to the enterprise could require more resources than management is willing to provide, but i think that, on a more manageable level, sound results can be found by even small teams and small initiatives.